However, It’s not just the traffic you should care about. Traffic on its own doesn’t necessarily translate into sales – I’m sure many of you can vouch for this.

It’s the money that people spend with you that makes SEO so important.

Let’s think about that for a second.

Say you wanted to rank #1 for the keyword “gymnastic rings” According to Ahrefs, that keyword has 3,700 searches a month in the United States.

Ranking #1 would result in an extra 2,100 visitors per month.

Assuming that 5% of that traffic converted, you’d make 105 sales a month. If each sale was worth $25 to you, you could generate $2,625.

That’d represent $31,500 worth of sales a year for one keyword and one product alone!

The keyword “gymnastic rings” is a short-tail word, however. If you sold many types of gymnastic rings, you could use that keyword as your category.

If you targeted a more long-tail version of that keyword for specific products, like “wooden gymnastic rings”, “best gymnastic rings” or “metal gymnastic rings” you could probably double, or even triple the organic traffic together with your revenue.

That’s the power of SEO for ecommerce.

SEO is a machine that pushes qualified traffic into your store. Traffic that converts. Traffic that puts money in your pocket.

Your aim should always be to increase the authority of your store, so you can rank all your pages better. But knowing where to start is a huge help!

Focus on your category pages first, and this is why:

Customers love to have the freedom to choose and explore their purchase. They want to see multiple products at different prices, with some good options. This can also help increase your AOV (average order value) across your website.

To do ecommerce SEO right, you must learn all the basics of it. Here’s everything you need to know.

Start With An Ecommerce SEO Audit

Nearly every new ecommerce SEO client makes the same mistake. They want to get straight into executing a link building strategy without taking care of the on site SEO foundations.

That’s like building a house without a blueprint.

You can do it, but it probably won’t work out. You need to make sure your store doesn’t have any on-site SEO problems before doing anything else.

Common problems include having a site that:

Is difficult for Google to crawl

Has next to no content (or tons of duplicate content)

Or a range of other technical issues like site structure or cannibilization

To make sure your store doesn’t have any of these problems, you want to run it through one of the best SEO audit tools: Screaming Frog.

You could also use the SEMRush or Ahrefs onsite audit tools as well if you don’t have Screaming Frog already.

Here’s how you do your ecommerce SEO audit step by step.

Ecommerce SEO Audit with Screaming Frog

To start, go to the Screaming Frog website and download their software. Screaming Frog is a tool you can use to crawl your entire site as if you were a Googlebot.

The best part is, it’s free up to 500 URLs. If you need more, you will need to pay the yearly license for £149.

But trust me, this tool will pay for itself with how much of an advantage it gives you.

Let’s say one of your clients was Chubbies, the men’s shorts company. To start analyzing their site, I’d first take their main URL, and add it to Screaming Frog and hit the “Start” button.

Once the crawl is finished, export the results. To make the exported file simpler, I will first filter the results by HTML, so I can get only the pages and ignore the Javascript files and images, among other things-

What you see in front of you will be the dashboard to fixing all of our on site SEO problems.

Now is also a great time to save the project, just click on File > Save and we can move onto fixing the most common problems first.

Duplicate Content

I have never had an ecommerce SEO client that didn’t suffer from huge amounts of duplicate content. That is when 2 or more pages have the same or very similar content.

This is often the cause of ecommerce SEO penalties like Panda and is one of the biggest negative SEO signals a site can have, so I like to take care of duplicate content first.

Although Screaming Frog is great at finding duplicate content I actually use a second free tool alongside Screaming Frog to make sure I catch everything.

So first let me show you how to find duplicate content with Screaming Frog.

Finding Duplicate Content With Screaming Frog

To find the pages with potential duplicate content issues, go to the URL tab in the second menu, and on filter, click “Duplicate.”

This report shows you all the pages that have duplicate content.

In this case, we can see the main cause of the duplicate content issue is the use of parameters-

Drilling down into this specific issue further, I can see that if they applied correct canonicalization tags – that would go a long way to fixing the issue.

To check your store’s speed, go to GTMetrix. Add your store and run the analysis.

As you can see in the results above there is HUGE room for improvement.

When a site is taking nearly 5 seconds to load we can assume that 40% of people are abandoning the site – what affect do you think that is having on annual revenue?

GTMetrix will also make a range of suggestions of things that you could improve on to increase site speed-

I suggest you have a developer work through these issues and re-test regularly.

You might also want to consider upgrading your web host to someone like Kinsta if you are running WooCommerce.

Store Architecture

Another important element that affects the user experience and Google’s crawl is your store architecture.

You want to have a simple site hierarchy, which separates your homepage from your product categories and your products listed within them.

A good rule of thumb is to make your visitors reach your product pages from your homepage within three clicks.

If you can build your store that way it will be easier for humans to use and search engines to crawl.

This can be seen in Screaming Frog really easily, in two different ways.

The first is to change from List View to Tree View. Now instead of seeing a long list of URLs, you’ll be viewing the overall site architecture:

Notice how Shopify neatly puts everything into /pages/, /collections/ and /products/, this makes it easy for Google to understand the site structure.

The other thing you should check is in the List View.

It’s called crawl depth, and it shows the shortest route to that page, based on which page you started from.

Let me explain:

If you start from your homepage, this is ground zero – your starting point.

Every page you link to from your homepage is now assigned a crawl depth of 1, because that’s how many clicks it would take.

Then Screaming Frog reviews every page that your crawl depth 1 pages links towards, and these are all assigned a value of 2. This goes on until the crawl is completed.

On the right-hand side, you’ll notice a window that shows the overview, site structure, response time, and API.

If you change this from overview to site structure, you’ll get a super useful graph to show you how many clicks your pages take.

Notice with Chubbies nearly everything is only 2 – 3 clicks from the homepage – this is a good site structure.

If yours has a lot more pages towards level 7 – 10, then you’ve got some work to do.

Keyword Research for E-commerce SEO

Even though Google has hundreds of ranking factors inside its algorithm, SEO still comes down to one major aspect of it: keywords.

This is the most important thing to keep in mind when it comes to on-page SEO.

Finding relevant keywords that bring qualified traffic to your store is one of the most important boxes to check when you conduct your SEO audit.

The Four Things Ecommerce Keywords Must Have

Keyword research is an art form in itself and this is especially true when it comes to ecommerce SEO.

Unlike normal keyword research there are some additional factors you need to consider.

I am going to show you how to find and analyse keywords in a moment, but for now let’s take a look at the 4 factors you need to pay attention to.

#1 – Search Volume

You can target a keyword with the best intent, low competition, and highest relevance, but if no one searches for it, your store won’t benefit from it.

The first factor to consider when doing keyword research is search volume.

In some niches, an average high-traffic keyword has over 10k searches per month, whereas in other niches 1k monthly searches is a lot.

Therefore, the best way to determine the best volume for a keyword is to take other high-traffic keywords as a benchmark.

Also, you need to consider the other three factors below before selecting a keyword. It can be tempting to select a keyword with the highest search volume, but that can end up doing more damage than good.

#2 – Intent

A common mistake SEO beginners make is that they try to target the keyword with the most amount of traffic possible.

Not only do they forget that one of the other factors (i.e., competition) makes it difficult to rank for, they also forget that it doesn’t matter how much traffic you have if it doesn’t convert into sales.

When you optimise a page, your goal shouldn’t be to acquire organic traffic; your goal should be to attract qualified traffic.

That means you want people to get to your website who are at the right stage of the sales funnel.

A sales funnel has four steps-

You want to draw the attention of people at the early stage of the funnel as well as the people who are at the end.

Generally speaking, the lower stages are smaller because there are fewer people in them. This isn’t bad at all; it means those fewer people have money ready to spend.

If you attracted 10,000 people with a 0.5% conversion rate whose average order value is $20, you’d bring $1,000 in revenue.

On the other hand, if you attracted 2,000 people that convert at 5% with an average order value of $20, your revenue would go up to $2,000.

More traffic does not equal more sales. Only increasing qualified traffic will equal more sales.

That’s the power of targeting keywords with the right intent.

Awareness Keywords

People at the awareness stage of the funnel tend to search for content that explains a problem. They use keywords that include-

Why

Reasons

List of

What is

Definition

Interest Keywords

People who already are looking for a solution to their problem, tend to use keywords that include words like-

How to

Ways

Guide (e.g., this article)

Tutorial

Product category (i.e., if you sell “diet dog food for bulldogs,” they will search for that particular keyword)

Brand name

Evaluation Keywords

Once a user starts to evaluate different products, they make searches with words related to a specific product, like:

Comparison

Price

Review

Product features

Cheap

Best

Top 10

Purchase Keywords

Finally, the people at the end of the funnel look for the best place to buy. They want a good offer, that’s why they use keywords like-

Discount

Free shipping

Buy now

Coupon

Discount

Deal

If you optimise your pages for these kind of keywords in each of the stages of the funnel, you will bring people with the right intent.

#3 – Relevance

To acquire the right audience you don’t only need to attract people with the right intent, but you also need to make it relevant to your store’s offerings.

Picking relevant keywords is simply a matter of thinking what you can offer that matches the given keyword.

Let’s say you worked for Chubbies, the company shown before, and you found the keyword “sports shoes” has over 10k searches per month in the United States.

If you take into consideration what they sell, you’d know it wouldn’t make sense to optimise their pages for that keyword as they don’t sell sports shoes.

The same logic should apply to your own store. Only optimise your pages for keywords that are relevant to your products.

I have found it’s super useful to look at the top 10 results for a keyword. This step takes longer, but it’s worth it!

If the pages that rank in the top 10 positions are similar to yours, then you have a good chance to make the first page.

Even better, if there’s lots of adverts – it’s probably very profitable. That’s two birds with one stone, and informs your entire strategy.

#4 – Competition

Keyword competition can be defined as the average authority a given page should have to achieve a top position for a particular keyword.

You must pick keywords for which you can realistically rank.

Let’s say you wanted to position for the keyword “cheap laptops.” If you take a look at Google’s results, you will see this:

To rank for that keyword, you’d need to compete with companies like Amazon, Ebay, and Walmart. As you know, these big brands have a level of authority you likely can’t compete against – yet.

So it’s better to attack the longer tail, lower competiton search keywords first

Ecommerce Keyword Analysis With SEMrush

SEMRush has a featured called “Keyword Difficulty,” which tells you about the competitiveness of a given keyword.

To find the keyword difficulty, enter the keyword you want to rank for in SEMrush search bar like this:

Then, head over the left menu, and click on “Keyword Difficulty“.

Here you can see the keyword we entered has a keyword difficulty of 75%, a very high value-

If you click on the keyword difficulty percentage, you will see the top 10 pages that rank for it with their respective domain strength.

As you can see, many high-authority sites rank for this keyword. Unless you had a store with a similar domain strength, the best idea would be to ignore this keyword or use a modifier that targeted a lesser competitive term.

SEMRush makes this easy, just head back to the keyword overview page and check out some of the phrase match or related keywords they recommend-

Then just rinse and repeat the process to check how competitve they are. The lower the competition, the easier and quicker it is for you to rank!

Ecommerce Keyword Research with Ahrefs

For the same keyword analyzed before, SEMrush gives a completely different picture. It shows a keyword difficulty of 1, based on the fact almost all the pages in the top 10 positions have no backlinks.

The results shown from both tools let us see neither tool is 100% correct. You should always search with both tools and see what results they give you.

While SEMrush focuses on the domain authority, Ahrefs focuses on the average amount of backlinks the top 10 results pages get.

Another great tip is to look at the URL rating for the websites that are currently ranking. This can be seen in the keyword explorer as well-

As you can see, having the highest URL rating doesn’t necessarily mean you will be the top ranking website. However, when you look at thousands of keywords, you’ll notice that there is a fairly good correlation.

Still not convinced?

Check out this Ahrefs blog post that looks at their own metrics. Whilst URL rating is not the same as Google PageRank, it has a pretty good correlation.

If you want to take your ecommerce keyword research to the next level with Ahrefs then I suggest you check out this tutorial.

How To Steal Your Competitors Best Keywords

You might be wondering:

What do I do if I don’t know which keywords I want to rank for?

A simple and effective way to tap a huge amount of keywords is by analyzing your competition and stealing all of their best keywords.

The SEMrush Way

Let’s say you sold longboards and one of your competitors was Skate Deluxe. You’d first put their URL in the search field:

Then, you’d need to click on the “Organic Research” link on the right handside-

There, you would see all the keywords Skate Deluxe is ranking for:

With this list, you’d need to export it and start analyzing it to find keywords that fit the 4 factors we talked about earlier.

For example, let’s say you think the keyword “skateboard tricks” would work on your site.

According to SEMrush this keyword has 6,600 monthly searches in the US, a keyword difficulty of 64%, and a CPC of $7.

So let’s take a closer look at the 4 factors we need to consier-

Search volume: The search volume is high, perfect!

Intent: The intent is mostly in the first stage of the funnel (awareness). That means that traffic that comes from this keyword is unlikely to convert into sales. Instead you could capture their email address for future marketing.

Relevance: The relevance is low to medium, as it’s not related to your products you sell but still in the same category of “Skateboards”.

Competition: The competition is high. A quick search shows us many high-authority websites, like Skate Deluxe (with a Domain Rating of 53), YouTube, and Wikipedia. The good news is that neither of these pages has many backlinks, which gives you the opportunity to create a piece of content that attracts links and ranks higher in the search engine results.

Overall this keyword would be good to use at the top of the funnel to acquire traffic for lead generation.

But its highly unlikely this keyword would deliver any significant uplift in sales revenue.

So now just rinse and repeat the process for each of your competitors best keywords. Review each of them against the factors above and decide whether or not it is something you could target.

Finding Even More Competitor Keywords With SEMRush

If you want even more keyword ideas, go back to SEMrush and click on the “Competitors” button:

There you will see a long list of domains that compete with your main competitor the search results.

Which means they also compete with your website!

But luckily for us we can just click on each one to find all of their best keywords as well.

So rather than just stealing your main competitors keywords, you can steal ALL of your competitors keywords.

Mwahahahaha!

With the list of domains shown by SEMRush, you repeat the same process shown above and get more ideas.

The Ahrefs Way

With Ahrefs we can repeat the same process like the one I showed you with SEMrush.

Add your competitor’s website into the search field and click on the “Search” button.

In the right sidebar, click on the “Organic keywords” report.

To make the analysis easier, let’s play with the filter bar a little-

Starting with the “Difficulty” filter we can easily find the low-hanging fruits.

Keywords that are relevant and have a moderate to high search volume but that have low competition. I’ll define the maximum difficulty to 25-

We can keep filtering the keywords by-

Volume (in the case you wanted high-traffic but low-conversion ones or vice versa)

Position (if you wanted to find keywords which your competitor isn’t properly targeting)

CPC (if you want to find keywords that have high-conversion potential)

and more…

For the sake of this example, I will filter the keywords a bit further based on CPC. I will add the filter to get keywords that have a minimum CPC of $2.

That means that your competitors are happy to spend $2 just to attract a single click from Google-

As you can see, you will find keywords with lower monthly searches but that are more focused on conversions.

This is good, as you want qualified traffic in your store.

Then just check the competition levels of each keyword as I taught you earlier.

At the end of this exercise, you should have a good list of keywords ready to use in the next section of this tutorial which focuses on on-site optimisation.

Optimising Your Stores On-Site SEO

In the last section we found and fixed all of the foundation on site SEO problems.

Now we are going to build on that foundation by optimsing your store from the ground up for your target keywords.

I already explained some of these SEO ranking factors in another article, so here I want to show you how they apply to an e-commerce store.

Let’s get started.

Your Title Tags

The title tag is one of the strongest SEO signals. Adding your target keyword in the title tag will help you increase the rankings of your pages.

The type of keywords you use will really depend on the type of page you are optimising.

You also want to consider that the title tag will be shown in search results so you need to write your title in a way that not only includes the keyword, but also entices people to click on your result.

When combined with a catchy title tag, you could end up with something like this-

With this structure, you can develop meta descriptions on scale. You only need to start with the problem, continue with your product and close it with a specific CTA.

Headings and Subheadings (H1, H2, etc.)

Every page should have one H1 that works as the main heading. Using headings breaks down the structure of a page and makes it easier for the users to scan and consume.

In the headings, you should always try to add both your main keywords as well as your LSI keywords – here’s a great example:

Instead of just focusing on the term ‘beard trimmers’, this UK supermarket has included ‘stubble’ as a relevant term in their title.

However, this is an example of a category page, what about product pages?

A typical e-commerce product page starts with the product’s name, which usually works as the H1. In most cases, you’d want to keep the H1 as your product name for relevancy and usability reasons.

If you use the same keyword across all your site, you create cannibalisation issues. This is bad, so try to stick to using the product name as the heading.

Then, the other headings (H2’s and H3’s) are commonly used to explain the features, return and refund policy, sizing, and shipping times.

If you have LSI keywords that include other words next to your product’s name, like “comparison,” or “reviews,” then make sure to add them as headings too.

Images

People often use Google Images to find products. For this reason, you must take your product image optimization seriously if you want to be found on Google Images.

To start, make the filename fit the product name. Instead of adding images with the filename IMG0010.jpg, use the product name and main keyword.

Continue with the examples used before, a filename could be:

longboard-pro-tricks.jpg

protein-max-pro-powder.jpg

If you have many LSI keywords for a given product, instead of calling each filename “productname1,” you could call it “productname-benefits,” “productname-features,” and “productname-discount,” like this-

After optimizing the filename, make sure to add a relevant alt-tag.

The same principle used in the filenames applies to the alt-tags. Add LSI keywords to each alt-tag and other variations to hit as many long-tail keywords as possible.

But remember these are used for visually impaired users in screen reader software. So keep the alt tag natural sounding. Lots of useful verbs, nouns and adjectives can really help.

Finally, optimize the size of the pictures to lower its size and make your pages faster to load. If you have a Shopify store, you can install an app like Image Optimizer which automatically optimizes your images.

How to Add Content that Converts to Your Product Pages

Product pages are the most important part of any e-commerce store; they are the equivalent of a retail store’s sales clerk.

After you have spent all the time and money to bring qualified traffic to your store, you need to make sure your product pages provide the right tools to motivate your visitors to become a customer of your company.

Keep reading to find out how you do it.

Note: A big problem many ecommerce stores make is they copy and paste category and product copy in multiple pages.

I don’t recommend this at all, as it causes duplicate content.

Always create original content in every category and product page; it’s one of the best investments you will make.

Show Your Value Proposition

Most visitors that arrive on a product page, they see the product, and they likely think to themselves “why should I buy this product from this company?”

The answer to this question is your value proposition.

The value proposition is what makes your company stand out from the rest; it’s what makes a visitor want to buy from you.

With the challenge Amazon represents to any e-commerce store, your store needs to make its value proposition shine.

To develop your value proposition, think about your company and your brand. What does your company offer that no one else does? What do you do better than anyone else?

You need to put that value proposition right in your product description. Make it clear what benefit your visitors will get from your products.

Let’s see some examples:

Amazon provides convenience thanks to their Prime program and the wide selection of products.

Chubbies is a company famous for their men’s shorts. Their value proposition, however, doesn’t focus on the products they sell, but on the lifestyle they offer to their customers.

Take a look at their product copy:

The copy they use is in line with their brand and their value proposition: fun and relaxation.

While Toms (the shoe company) value proposition is the way they give back to those in need. You buy their products because you want to help other people, and they show it on their product pages.

You should think about your value proposition and how to integrate it smartly within your product pages.

Use As Many High Quality Pictures As Possible

One of the main challenges customers face online is the inability to touch, try, and feel the products they shop.

For this reason, e-commerce stores must show the highest-quality pictures they can.

Some e-commerce store owners that sell wholesale products may just show the retailer’s photos, which in many cases aren’t high-quality. The lack of high-quality product photography represents a costly mistake.

Mr. Porter, the luxury clothing retailer, lets you zoom in and see the details of their products.

ASOS.com, the famous British online clothing retailer, shows you how their products look in real life with the help of a model and great lighting.

WatchShop lets you see a 360-degree view of their watches, which proves to be useful on a luxurious product like a watch.

To take high-quality product photos, hire a professional photographer. Unless you have a big product turnover (which means you’ll be changing your product’s images every few months), you need to think of photography as one of the most important investments you can make.

If you cant afford a photographer then invest in a portable lightbox and a DSLR so you can capture your own high quality images on demand.

Take a look at the setup I use-

Heck you could even take things to another level and also invest in a small turntable to create simple product videos to display alongside your images.

Write Amazing Product Descriptions

Along with great product photography, having great product descriptions allow customers to understand what a product is and what it does.

Despite its importance, most e-commerce stores commit three serious mistakes when they write their product descriptions:

They copy/paste manufactuer descriptions (guaranteed to get you penalised)

They focus on the features of the products, not on their benefits

They leave out key information that aids the buying decision

Start with showing the benefits of your products, not the features. Think how the customer will benefit from using your products and how it will help them solve their problems.

If you have a list of features, take each one and think about the benefit it brings to your customers.

On the other hand, if you sell technical products, leave the features for the most technical-savvy people who understand and want to read the technical details.

DeLonghi, the famous Italian house appliances company, shows five tabs-

Overview – Including images, video, pricing and short bullet points of features

Key Features – Each feature is described in detail with supporting imagery

Detail – A bullet point list of every single feature (including the boring ones)

Specifications – A table of technical specifications like container capacity

Manuals/FAQ/Support – The ability to download and read the manual BEFORE you buy and how to get help

Sephora focuses both on their features (the “what you get”) and the benefits women get from using their products (the “why should you care”) while also providing tutorials on how to use the product.

Writing a compelling product description will not only help lead your customer into the sale, but will also send all of the right signals to Google when it comes to ranking your product pages in the search engines.

If you take a shortcut here and copy/paste the manufacturer provided description – you will never see any significant rankings in Google period.

Use Testimonials (or customer reviews)

Showing your visitors what previous customers have said about your products is one of the most effective ways to lower their fears and doubts about shopping with your company.

Testimonials work because people want to see what other people think. Psychologists call this “social proof,” and it’s an easy way for you to increase your conversion rate and trust.

According to Reevoo, 50 or more reviews per product can help you get a 4.6% increase in conversion rates.

Best Buy shows a long list of customer reviews for all their products, including their TVs as shown below:

And not only that but they give other customers the chance to reply to those reviews to ask any follow up questions they might have about the product.

In fact, Amazon even go a step further by sending emails out to people that have previously bought a product when someone has a question-

This is a great social strategy from Amazon that keeps a fresh supply of user generated content coming in while previous customers help potential customers convert into sales.

If you use Shopify, adding testimonials to your store is easy with the help of the following plugins:

And for the WooCommerce users out there you could integrate testimonials and reviews with this plugin or this plugin.

Link Building for Ecommerce

Link building for e-commerce works like any other type of link building.

The more high-quality links you get pointing to your store with a favorable anchor text, the more it will help you increase your store’s positioning in the search engines.

What makes link building for e-commerce different than, say, link building for a local store or a media site, is that an e-commerce business needs links pointing to every section of its store, including the category and product pages.

And instead of analysing every link from each competitor manually, sort them by Domain Rating and attack the more valuable links first.

As a rule of thumb, sites with a Domain Rating over 60 and pages with Page Rating over 40 are considered as high-quality. This will help you prioritize your efforts.

Then just take each link, open them in your browse and try to see how your competitor got these links so you can replicate it.

Stealing your competitors best backlinks is my all time favorite link building strategy.

Do Guest Posting (Yeah Yeah, I Know)

Guest posting is one of my favorite ecommerce link building techniques. It can help you build authentic relationships with industry bloggers while growing your site’s exposure.

Doing guest posting allows you to get high-quality links that can help you increase your rankings for branded keywords.

The guest posting process can be summed up in five steps:

Start by prospecting your industry

Qualify your prospects

Outreach

Create the content

Build the relationships with the bloggers and webmasters

Create an Excel sheet with each site you find so you can qualify them later.

Then, analyze each site based on a set of qualifiers. Here the set of attributes I use to qualify my prospects:

Domain authority (metric used by Moz)

Trustflow (metric used by MajesticSEO)

Number of referring link domains

Placement of content

Niche relevance

Quality of content

Once you have the definitive list of sites, you need to start outreaching. Take each site on your list and look for the contact information (i.e. name and email address) of the person with whom you’d like to connect.

Or if you want to make things 100x quicker, you can use a tool like Ninja Outreach that will not only find great places to guest post – but also pull back all of the metrics you need to make informed decisions.

It will also automatically find all of the contact information you need and makes the entire process from finding prospects to contacting them a 3 click process.

After you connect with someone in each site, create an article outline. Don’t forget to add a few links pointing to your site. If you don’t know if the webmaster will accept them, ask them!

With the article finished, send it and wait for a response. You are likely to get a few rounds of edits, so make the necessary changes until the article is approved.

Once the article goes live, don’t forget to promote it on your social media as well as participate in the comment section.

When you first get started with your link building efforts, you may need to guest post a couple dozen times until you have built a foundation.

In order to capture the local traffic, your store has to have three attributes:

It must have a business name

It must feature a local phone number matching your city or location

It must have a physical street address where your business trades

The trifecta of your name, address, and phone number is known as NAP. Remember this acronym as you will hear about it a lot later on.

With this said, let me share some basic local SEO tips for your store.

Claim Your Profile

Your first step is to create and claim the local profile with Google, known as Google My Business.

Once you are on the website, click on “Start Now.”

Log in to your account. After you do that, you’ll be redirected to a map-

Enter all your business details. Remember to add your business name as it should show in the Google results.

Also, double check to make sure you don’t make any mistakes with the address or the phone number.

Once you have finished the process, Google will publish your store in their results which makes for a quick win.

Link Building for Local E-commerce SEO

The main difference between non-local and local SEO is related to the link building. In local SEO, link building is called “citation building.”

A citation refers to any website where it shows your business name, address, and phone number on the same page and in the same format as your local listing.

A citation looks something like this:

Your Company Ltd.
150 Piccadilly
St. James’s
London
W1J 9BR

020 7493 8181

Unlike link building, building citations is a relatively simple process: you go to local business directories and you add your website in there.

Instead of having to manually find every local business directory, you can use a tool like Whitespark. Their software helps you find specific citation building opportunities for your store.

You can also hire a company to build citations for your store. I personally recommend Loganix, as they provide a great service at a low price. You can also take advantage of a special discount which gives you a 15% discount on your next manual local SEO citation building services.

Two other companies that offer a great service at a low price are The Hoth and SERPLogic.

On-Site Optimisation for Local SEO

Make sure to add your name, address, and phone numbers on every page of your store, in the same format as your Google local listing.

Also, use the name of your City and State in the different SEO elements, like the title tags, meta description, and content on your website.

Finally, Take advantage of what Schema has to offer; their local business and postal address markup can help search engines identify and display your location.

Get Reviews

Another important element to consider for any e-commerce store is the onlinereviews.

You must make sure to get the reviews on your listing because Google considers this factor important when ranking a website.

Reviews are displayed in the right corner of a local search query, under the map.

The quality and quantity of reviews are strong factors in Google and you should pay attention to them,

A good way to get more reviews for your store is to ask both new and existing clients to leave a review on your Google listing. You can set up an automated email to do so as well.

Your Google listing isn’t the only place where you should ask people to leave a review. You should encourage your customers to leave a review on sites like Yelp or Scoot but you should focus on Google above all else.

E-commerce SEO Case Studies

Let’s face it, we all getting a peak behind the closed doors of other ecommerce sites right?

Case Study #1: Furniture E-commerce Store

One of my clients was a well-established furniture store with a relatively limited but natural link profile.

Their main challenge was they were competing for their main keywords with e-commerce giants such as Ikea, Tesco, and Marks and Spencers, among others.

Due to the high competition, their company couldn’t rank their pages on the first two pages of Google for their main keywords. To make matters worse, they were struggling to rank for long tail keywords as well.

With the help of my agency, we conducted a full audit and kicked off a 3 pronged link building campaign-

First we built links to the homepage to improve the site’s domain authority and bring initial traffic growth.

Then we started targeting the key category pages using exact match anchor text, which helped drive traffic to a wide range of broad and long tail keywords.

Finally, we focused on some laser specific niche relevant targets to boost the overall niche relevancy.

All of that had a dramatic effect-

Organic search traffic from Google has exploded on the site since 2015.

Not only that but the site has now generated a total of £18,811,325 or just over 26 million dollars in ecommerce revenue-

I don’t normally reply to your articles but I will this time around as its very relevant to me and my business.

So, a couple of years ago I stumbled across one of your posts, finding it very interesting and this was my call to action to sign up to your newsletter, “I Trusted in What you were Saying” why? you back up everything you say so its fair to say proof is on the pudding :-)

So my eCommerce store http://www.tea-and-coffee.com for years was having a nice growth but I always know it was only 5% where it could truly be, lots of time has gone in, in terms of content usability but just could not do it all.

We have the largest collection of loose teas on the planet and some of the most amazing coffees, price wise only the best.

So I popped your agency and email, I spoke first of to Raf, instantly gave me confidence in your guy, Rad now PM’s the project, a very knowledgeable chap and pleasant to speak with.

So its been about 6 months with your agency, my thoughts so far:-

The first couple of months was all about getting the on-site sorted but straight into link building and the speed the work was carried out was impressive.

6 Months in and yes I can see the benefits of the work been done, not quite in the money making positions as of yet but I do see some competitive KW’s getting to pages 2 and 3 so this is nice to see.

Hopefully in the coming 2 to 3 months with more of your agencies magic and a new website going with lots of new sexy features we can doubles over the next 12 months.

Keep up your amazing, honest and trustworthy post I will continue to follow and looking forward to the next article to land in my inbox.

Thanks for the kind words glad to see you are taking action to grow your business further!

There are so many ways to attack this niche you are really spoilt for choice, especially when it comes to content creation!

Keep it steady and I am sure you’ll be dominating the competition in no time and when you do your redesign, in my personal opinion the homepage above the fold needs a lot of work and I love the “additional info” box on the product pages (perhaps needs a buy button under that bit)

O** Matthew this is the most comprehensive ecommerce guide I have ever come across. You have added so much value and information to it. I was actually going to optimise my site and then received your email about your ecommerce SEO guide. I am so glade that I have subscribed to your email list .
Complete ecom SEO guide for free what else anybone can expect .

Ya this is a great guide especially with the screaming frog tutorials Im really glad i got my hands on this juicy bit of info Matt. Cheers its great to see all is going well. I have one question though , is this increase in traffic mainly due to PBN links

Ops! I made the last comment from my mobile and wanted to say, you did mention the point on “Internal Linking For E-commerce SEO and I shared a bit story :) how interlinking adds value to my past e-commerce client site.

We see so many of these problems from both our website design clients and our SEO clients. When we start a new site for someone to many times they come to us asking to target the highest search searches when the other metrics don’t work for them. Or when people comes to us for SEO wanting to know why they get no traffic and you look and realise the keywords they are targeting get virtually no searches.. I’ll share this to our business pages now. Great guide and with fab tips

Most of the “duplicates” I’m getting are between https and http. Does this actually matter to Google? My site forces SSL so I don’t know why http is even coming up – should this be an issue I’m trying to fix? If so, do you have any good resources on how to do it?

Hi Matthew,
I think one of the biggest challenges eCommerce or online retail stores face is creating a content strategy that works. You talk about finding that “keyword” and building links around it, but most retail stores online just use product placement and very little text.

My question is do you think that retail stores online should absolutely have a blog? Or better, do you think it’s a good idea to accept guest posts based on testimonials? Will this provide better rankings in one way or another?

I just really feel it’s difficult to build high DA links to product pages, if you get my meaning.

They should have a blog if that aligns with their overall strategy and they are able to keep up with the financial and time demands of running/maintaining/growing a blog.

You wouldn’t start a blog purely for SEO reasons although if there is a blog you can leverage that for SEO reasons.

You are correct it is hard to build links to product pages, which is why with correct site structure and category optimisation – you can drive a lot of product pages with internal links but again some people have static product ranges others have dynamic so you might priortise or de-prioritse link building to product pages accordingly.